Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. (8 September 1922-12 February 2019) was an American political activist who ran for President in each election from 1976 to 2004 as either a Third Positionist US Labor Party or Democratic candidate. He was known to have fascistic tendencies and to be a far-right politician.

Biography
Lyndon LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire in 1922, and, after dropping out of Northeastern University in Boston in 1942 due to his dislike for his professors' "incompetence", he served in the US Army in India and Burma during the last year of World War II. In 1946, while on the return trip to the United States, he became a Trotskyist, and he went on to return to Northeastern. In 1949, he joined the Socialist Workers Party, but he became a management consultant in New York City in 1953 and focused more on his career than the SWP during the 1960s. He soon became disillusioned with the SWP and sought to build a "Fifth International". In 1967, he began to teach a class on Karl Marx's dialectical materialism at New York City's Free School, and, as an academic, he oversaw the formation of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) during the 1968 Columbia University protests. Soon, the NCLC came to have over 600 members in 25 cities - including West Berlin and Stockholm - and they developed the subversive goal of taking control of the USA's trade unions and overthrowing the government. His movement assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and his followers created an intelligence network which smeared opponents as being gays or Nazis. In 1984, he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany (named for philosopher Friedrich Schiller).

LaRouche soon abandoned his New Left views in favor of Third Positionist views; from April to September 1973, NCLC members began attacking "left-proto-fascists". NCLC members also assaulted CPUSA, SWP, Progressive Labor Party, and Black Power activists on the streets and during meetings, with at least 60 assaults being reported. In 1973, LaRouche founded the US Labor Party as the NCLC's political wing, and, while the party originally preached for Marxist revolution, it held right-wing views by 1977. By 1979, his party had 1,000 members with 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America, and his party was now an extreme-right and anti-Semitic organization (despite having Jewish members). His party's racism endeared it to the Ku Klux Klan and the American Independent Party. After 1976, the US Labor Party began to send reports on left-wing organizations to the FBI and local police, and they also gave up anti-apartheid activists to the South African government, reported student dissidents to Iran's SAVAK secret police, and they reported anti-nuclear activists to power companies. In 1976, LaRouche began the first of eight presidential bids, running as the US Labor Party candidate. However, in 1979 he became a Democrat, but the Democratic National Committee refused to recognize him as a party member or to seat the few delegates he received in his presidential primary campaigns. He advocated a return to the Bretton Woods Conference's monetary system, abolishing the International Monetary Fund, replacing the Federal Reserve System with a national bank, a war on drug trafficking, the prosecution of banks involved in money laundering, building a tunnel under the Bering Strait, the building of nuclear power plants, a military buildup to prepare for imminent war with the Soviet Union, the screening and quarantine of AIDS patients, and opposed environmentalism, deregulation, and abortion. While LaRouche accused Ronald Reagan of receiving Iranian support during his 1980 presidential bid, he supported his Strategic Defense Initiative. From 1986 to 1988, his offices were raided by the FBI due to allegations of credit card fraud and obstruction of justice, and he was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 15 years in prison; however, he was released in 1994.

LaRouche continued to be active in politics, claiming that 9/11 was an inside job and an attempted coup, that Israel was planning to commit Nazi-style crimes against Palestinians, and denied global warming. In 2009, he advocated for single-payer healthcare and criticized Obamacare, comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. He died in 2019 at the age of 96.